When we think about digital information, we often think about size. A daily email newsletter, for example, may be 75 to 100 kilobytes in size. But data also has dimensions, based on the numbers of variables in a piece of data. An email, for example, can be viewed as a high-dimensional vector where there’s one coordinate for each word in ...

An international team of scientists announced they had successfully edited the DNA of human embryos. As people process the political, moral and regulatory issues of the technology — which nudges us closer to nonfiction than science fiction — researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Temple University show the time is now to involve the American public in discussions about ...

A chance discovery has opened up a new method of finding unknown viruses. In research published in the journal Virus Evolution, scientists from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology have revealed that Next-Generation Sequencing and its associated online DNA databases could be used in the field of viral discovery. They have developed algorithms that detect DNA from viruses that happen to ...

We learn in school that matter comes in three states: solid, liquid and gas. A bored and clever student (we’ve all met one) then sometimes asks whether glass is a solid or a liquid. The student has a point. Glasses are weird “solid liquids” that are cooled so fast their atoms or molecules jammed before organizing themselves in the regular ...

Scientists at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK have developed a concept called Empowerment to help robots to protect and serve humans, while keeping themselves safe. Robots are becoming more common in our homes and workplaces and this looks set to continue. Many robots will have to interact with humans in unpredictable situations. For example, self-driving cars need to ...